Gaudi

In class we spoke of the ways in which an artist can find a solution to a "mathematical" problem in a piece of art by using calculation or through trial and error - an often correct and faster method. I spent my fall semester in Barcelona, Spain last year living down the street from Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia. We spoke of him in all of my courses, with particular emphasis on his precision of detail and innovative architectural techniques. I guess I had just assumed he was a mathematician of sorts to make such brave choices in his designs, but as it turns out, he used little math. This discovery fascinates me. I have copied a bit about one of his techniques below:

"Gaudí spent ten years working on studies for the design, and developing a new method of structural calculation based on a stereostatic model built with cords and small sacks of pellets. The outline of the church was traced on a wooden board (1:10 scale), which was then placed on the ceiling of a small house next to the work site. Cords were hung from the points where columns were to be placed. Small sacks filled with pellets, weighing one ten-thousandth part of the weight the arches would have to support, were hung from each catenaric arch formed by the cords. Photographs were taken of the resulting model from various angles, and the exact shape of the church's structure was obtained by turning them upside-down obtaining therefore the form, absolutely precise and exact, of the structure of the building, without having to have conducted an operation of calculation and without possibility of error. The forms of cords corresponded to the lines of tension of the prim structure and when inverting the photo, the lines of pressure of the compressed structure were obtained. An absolutely exact and simple method, giving an example of the intuitive and elementary methods that Gaudí applied in its architecture and that allowed him to obtain balanced forms very similar to which nature offers."